From Here to Eternity: Tim Rice’s musical sidesteps the famous surf frolic but delivers on the song’n’dance

When the Tim Rice musical adaptation of the James Jones novel behind the Burt Lancaster Deborah Kerr wartime romance premiered in the autumn of 2013, some joked that a better title might be From Here to November. In the event it closed the following March, a month earlier than expected but far from the disaster some had anticipated.

It was scarcely the credibility of those involved that had dampened expectations, but the unlikely nature of the material: mainly the testosterone-fuelled tensions and frustrations within a US army base in Hawaii during the Second World War. And how to match that infamous scene in which Lancaster and Kerr frolic in the surf?

This plucky revival answers the latter question by skating so quickly over that moment it might as well not be there at all. Working to a revised and considerably leaner version of Donald Rice and Bill Oakes’s book, Brett Smock’s production marginalises the affair between Adam Rhys-Charles’s conflicted Warden and Carley Stenson’s Karen Holmes for the visceral cut and thrust of army life, with all its casual racism, violence and homophobia, in the week leading up to the Pearl Harbor attacks. Jonathan Bentley’s tormented Private Prewitt seeks respite from the quasi sadistic Captain Holmes with a sex worker Lorene (Desmonda Cathabel, notably excellent). Jonny Amies’s beautifully empathetic Maggio – in a subplot omitted from the film – is badly brutalised for dishing out sexual favours to his fellow soldiers.

Yet the show still struggles to find a sufficiently propulsive plot, or, indeed, cast particularly fresh insight into the hothouse aggressions of military fraternity. The spoken dialogue is far less eloquent than Rice’s lyrics, meaning that few characters swim into sufficient psychological focus. The pivotal friendship between Prewitt and Warden is frustratingly underplayed. Stenson’s Karen Holmes has a lovely smoky singing voice but struggles to piece that character’s marital despair. There’s an awful lot of stock villainy going on, notably in the army’s higher ranks.

But Smock’s production itself, with its sinewy choreography and strong sense of soldiers as both brothers and perennial outsiders, does bring out the best in Stuart Brayson’s muscular, if slightly too jolly mash-up of swampy blues, swing and jazz. There’s colourful, if all too brief work from Eve Polycarpou as the tough-talking Mrs Kipfer, madame at the local brothel. The eventual attack on the base is hauntingly underscored by some sublime female choral harmonising. Smock won’t persuade those who doubted the musical first time round that it’s essential viewing after all. But this revival should certainly have no trouble seeing out November.

Until Dec 17. Tickets: 08444 930 650; charingcrosstheatre.co.uk